I. THE PARTY POLITICS OF DEFENSE SPENDING IN POSTWAR AMERICA

Partisan politics have long been at the heart of national security debates in America. During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the rural–urban divide in the Northeast affected the reshaping of partisan coalitions over American foreign and military policy.Footnote ⁹ As the urban Northeast gradually elected a greater number of Democrats to Congress, FDR successfully crafted a North–South coalition on free trade and neutrality issues. By the time France was defeated by Nazi Germany in May 1940, partisan cleavage over defense expenditures had almost disappeared. Almost all Democrats, including southern members, came to support strongly their President's initiatives on defense spending. The Republican Party also generally followed the direction of the Democratic President.

After World War II ended, partisan politics once again engaged in the debate over the nation's postwar policy direction and adjustment.Footnote ¹⁰ On one side were those who envisioned the United States as a great military and economic power and the champion of democracy against the Soviet Union. In the other camp were those who invoked an older political culture that was isolationist, antistatist, and antimilitarist.Footnote ¹¹ Conservative Republicans such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio entered postwar politics during the Republican-dominated 80th Congress in 1947 determined to dismantle the New Deal and avoid the possible nightmare of a “garrison state.”Footnote ¹² The main Republican voice on foreign policy, however, was Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who turned around his earlier isolationist position to support of the internationalism of FDR and Truman. Senator Vandenberg demonstrated significant Republican support for Truman's foreign policy of Soviet containment by helping to approve the Marshall Plan through a skeptical Congress.Footnote ¹³ Also, with the internationalist Dwight Eisenhower grasping the presidential nomination backed by New York governor Thomas Dewey in 1952 and defeating the isolationist Robert Taft, a decade-and-a-half-long pattern of eastern Republicans thwarting the party's Mid-western base continued over the foreign policy area.Footnote ¹⁴

With respect to the level of defense spending, Friedberg finds it remarkable how small American defense budgets were during the first fifteen years of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁵ Friedberg noticed how quickly the forces opposing higher military expenditures had reasserted themselves after the Korean War. During the early Cold War, fiscal constraints, such as downward political pressure on taxation and a balanced budget, were the single most important factor pushing the United States toward a strategy of minimum deterrence and massive atomic capability without relying on conventional military forces. The relative unity of the Democratic Party and bipartisanship over Cold War internationalism had persisted through the Kennedy military buildup and Johnson's two-front war against Vietnam and poverty.Footnote ¹⁶ Democrats were largely confident in both guns and butter in the course of the early Cold War. The 1968 election of Nixon as a conservative Republican President, however, severely damaged Democratic Party cohesion over the choice between defense expenditures (guns) and welfare spending (butter).

As Rae correctly notices,Footnote ¹⁷ public perception of the Republicans as tough on foreign policy allowed Republican Presidents to be far more flexible and innovative in international affairs than Democratic Presidents during the Cold War. This paradox is well expressed in the observation that “only Nixon can go to China.” In addition, despite his own détente policy towards China and the Soviet Union, Nixon constantly proposed more defense spending than Congress wanted to approve. To some extent, Nixon's avoidance of defense spending cuts was an electoral strategy designed to court the votes of southern whites.Footnote ¹⁸ In the end, during the 91st Congress (1969–70), the Republican Party and the Democratic Party once again reshaped their positions on the level of military spending and the direction of American foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁹ As Coleman correctly notes,Footnote ²⁰ defense appropriation was the policy issue over which Democrats were most intensely split and divided during the 1970s.

II. MEMBERS OF US CONGRESS AND POLICY CHANGE THROUGH POSITION-TAKING

Addressing the challenging task of staking out a new policy position, the party leadership often faces difficulties in persuading some of its rank-and-file members. Rank-and-file party members often represent diverse constituency preferences or personal ideologies within the “umbrella-like” political parties in America. In addition, party competition at the national level does not automatically guarantee position conversion on the part of rank-and-file members. Party members tend to place more emphasis on their own political benefits than on the credibility of party position. Ultimately, it is rank-and-file members who collectively create and change party positions through legislative processes. Credible voting records that are largely in accordance with constituency preferences are vital for members of Congress as “single-minded seekers of re-election.”Footnote ²¹ Consequently, legislators as party members weigh in electoral benefits from their party positions and their own voting records. A party's policy stance is a form of a “collective” position. A legislator's voting record is a “personal” position. Both positions are critical for the party's rank-and-file members.Footnote ²²

It was Mayhew, in his seminal work on legislator behavior, who described members of Congress in America as “single-minded-seekers-of-reelection.”Footnote ²³ He offers detailed accounts of three specific activities in which lawmakers engage for the pursuit of their reelection goals: advertising, credit-claiming, and position-taking. According to Mayhew, position-taking is “the public enunciation of a judgmental statement on anything likely to be of interest to political actors … and the statement may take the form of a roll call vote.”Footnote ²⁴ Snyder and Ting also suggest that position-taking strategies include “introducing and cosponsoring bills, making speeches, and building roll call records that are in tune with their constituents.”Footnote ²⁵ They argue that an endogenous preference for position-taking emerges with citizens and legislators both preferring “open” proceedings.

Based on the congressional literature, I assume roll-call voting decisions to be one of the major position-taking activities of legislators. What is also worth noting is the fact that members of Congress engage in position-taking activities regardless of whether they bring about the policy outcomes as they prefer. In other words, prior to final passage voting, party members often take positions that do not necessarily concur with those of their party. Mayhew also clearly points out that “in a large class of legislative undertakings, the electoral payment is for positions rather than effort.”Footnote ²⁶ I argue that Congressional members tend to show their party-splitting positions, if necessary, in legislative processes, particularly when the final outcome of a bill at stake is highly predictable.

The formation of intraparty coalitions is another bottom-up strategy employed by rank-and-file party members over party position change. In the majority party, where diverse coalitions inherently exist, party members tend to form groups beyond their committee membership. Similar constituency preferences, such as sectional interests or district ideology, tend to lead legislators to build and join an intraparty caucus.Footnote ²⁷ Making their collective cases inside and outside the party, the intraparty group members often make their voting decisions together, especially over policy issues which may heavily impact their own reelections. Indeed, intraparty group members across the committees often prevail over committees' gate-keeping power. Thus they effectively push for specific policy interests shared by cross-pressured members.

According to Rae, “American party factions have proven to be elusive, and thus resistant to analysis.”Footnote ²⁸ The loose and decentralized nature of American parties has prevented party factions from developing the organizational skills, discipline, and durability found among party factions in other Western democracies.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, it is hard to deny that factional configuration within the parties has constantly influenced the strategic calculations of party leaders in executing their legislative and electoral strategies.Footnote ³⁰ In essence, I claim that ideological, regional, and distributive politics surrounding foreign-policy issues also interact with party factions.Footnote ³¹ In addition, along with individual legislators' ideological changes from Congress to Congress, the rise and fall of party factions might also account for partisan polarization in the legislature.Footnote ³² Legislators often get their voting cues from the same faction members as well as from the same party members.

III. THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE DEBATES IN THE HOUSE, 1969–1970

In 1969, the costly Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) system, combined with the disastrous policies of the Vietnam War, fueled public and Congressional concerns about the nation's defense-policy directions. In its special reports on defense spending, the Congressional Quarterly Almanac states that “The defense debate of 1969 was a major departure from past congressional clashes over military policy.”Footnote ³³ Voters and their representatives raised questions about whether it was still viable to sustain both New Deal welfare spending and a high-cost defense budget.Footnote ³⁴ The Vietnam War and stagflation, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, made them suspect that guns and butter might no longer be compatible. Diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber summarizes that the Johnson Administration gambled that American society could endure a vast array of domestic reforms, while fighting an extended war against an untiring enemy,Footnote ³⁵ but Johnson ultimately lost the “life-or-death bet.” Congressional debates on the ABM system were at the heart of the controversy over how to redefine national security policies in the post-Vietnam and the post-New Deal era at the same time.

In the 91st Congress (1969–70), when liberal Democrats had a Republican President in the White House, the ABM debates set a new stage for substantial vote-switching by Congressional members. After a bitter three-day debate, on 3 October 1969, the House passed a $21.3 billion authorization bill for military hardware and research, having repeatedly rejected attempts to cut up the bill.Footnote ³⁶ A final but controversial action on the bill and the ABM system was a recommittal motion proposed by Representative O'Konski (R – WI), which would have deleted funds for both procurement and research on ABM. The motion to recommit the bill to committee intended to delete $345.5 million for procurement and $400.9 million for research for the Safeguard ABM system. Opponents of ABM claimed that O'Konski's motion to cut research funds did not properly represent the position of any opponent. Even Republican leader Gerald Ford virtually admitted that the intention behind the motion to recommit was to ensure a substantial vote in favor of the President's ABM program.

Liberal Democrats unsuccessfully tried to block a vote on the recommittal motion, when the House (on a 225–142 roll call) voted for a motion by L. Mendel Rivers. Representative Rivers, a South Carolina Democrat chairing the Armed Services Committee, ordered the previous question on the motion to recommit and thereby tried to cut off debates. Indeed, this vote was one of the fifteen key votes used by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) to measure member ideology and voting records. ADA suggests that voting against the Rivers motion had the effect of a 10 percent cut in the military procurement legislation.Footnote ³⁷ The ABM bill was finally passed by a huge majority (322 yeas versus 47 nays). Table 1 shows the breakdown of three roll call votes over the ABM system on 3 October 1969.

Table 1.

Intermediate votes versus final passage over the ABM controversy, 3 October 1969, 91st Congress

Note: Three consecutive roll call votes on the same day over ABM positions: RC #92 (strongly anti-ABM), RC #91 (fairly anti-ABM), RC #93 (pro-ABM).

Party explanation

Partisan affiliation has been also introduced as a critical vote determinant for Congressional members on foreign-policy agendas.Footnote ⁴² Members are often faced with different party positions in Congress, such as being members of the presidential party or the out-party, or being members of a majority party or a minority party. Different partisan affiliation might lead members to understand differently the policy implications of similar votes over foreign policies. Presidential party members, for instance, tend to vote for presidential positions on national security and foreign policies.Footnote ⁴³ Majority-party members in a divided government, on the other other hand, often position themselves against the President's foreign policies.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, prior to the 91st Congress, Democrats with a President in the White House were largely united on the issue of Vietnam War and guns-and-butter choices. The main force of the bipartisan coalition until the Vietnam War was a coalition between Democrats and eastern Republicans in support of an active and internationalist strategy toward free trade and a collective security system. When Nixon's first Congress convened in 1969, however, the political context changed dramatically. The Republican Party, having been consistently anticommunist, had its President controlling American foreign policies and had its members highly united on a conservative agenda in Congress.

As for the Democratic side, northern Democrats began to defect from their original positions of support for defense spending during the Cold War consensus. Liberal members from the northern areas tried to use the defense spending issue not only to score political points with their constituents, but also to promote their positions and liberal ideas within the Democratic Party, which was still dominated by southern Democrats. As Rohde has pointed out, liberal Democrats believed that institutional arrangements largely based on the seniority system were unfairly biased against their policy preferences.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition, by the end of the Johnson administration, issues not only of domestic policy, but also of foreign and defense policy, became the locus of intraparty conflict. Figure 1 show how northern Democrats became increasingly hostile to ABM appropriations in Congress, while southern Democrats remained largely united and stable in supporting the ABM system.

Figure 1.

Percentage of anti-ABM votes by northern versus southern Democrats.

I also identify and incorporate into the model the membership list of the Democratic Study Group (DSG), a liberal caucus within the Democratic Party, which promoted liberal agendas.Footnote ⁴⁶ As for the Republicans as minority-party members in Congress, partisan strategies to build favorable positions that appeal to swing voters in national elections are hypothesized to affect members' policy positions. In his analysis of regulatory policy decisions in Congress, James points out that “to retain the presidency as a much-desired party resource, rank-and-file party members repeatedly fell in line behind choices that repudiated their own strongly held policy preferences.”Footnote ⁴⁷ I examine whether this logic is applied to rank-and-file members of the Republican Party when they vote on the ABM spending bills, for which President Nixon had announced his support two months after his inauguration. Table 2 identifies who switched their voting decisions over a one-year period from 1968 to 1969.

Table 2.

Vote change over the ABM program: 1968 (LBJ) versus 1969 (Nixon)

Source: Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1968, 1969.

IV. FINDINGS

Table 3 reports the results of empirical analysis. Since the dependent variable is dichotomous (yea or nay vote by members of Congress), I used the probit regression analysis of members' roll call votes. The first model includes all the explanatory variables except for the interactive terms, with the interactive terms added into the second model. Indeed, the independent variables could be categorized into three groups of explanations: members' voting history, constituency pressures, and party influences. The second model, with interactive terms, is designed to show the distinct roles of competitive and liberal districts and Democratic leaders in inducing members to vote against the ABM appropriation bills.

Table 3.

Probit analysis of continuing members' position-taking: Voting anti-ABM in 1969, 91st Congress (1st Session)

N=377.

*** significant at 0·01; ** significant at 0·05; * significant at 0·1. Dependent variable is the legislator's position on the ABM system in 1969 (1=oppose, 0=otherwise).

Overall, the roll call voting analysis performs well and confirms the literature on voting stability by members of Congress. Table 3 clearly shows that vote history in time t minus 1 (1968) heavily influences members' vote decisions in time t (1969). All models present that members' vote choice in 1968 significantly led them to cast votes the same way in 1969. If a member was supportive of the ABM system in 1968, he was likely to endorse ABM appropriation bills in 1969. When a member critical of defense spending voted against the weapons system in 1968, he was more likely to oppose ABM spending in 1969. The probability of a member standing by his or her initial position in 1969 increases by almost 49 percent. Congressional members rarely change their positions.

Although members of Congress show a great degree of voting stability, the 91st Congress under Nixon's first year in office introduced new voting contexts to many lawmakers. If representing a liberal and competitive district, representatives are more inclined to become opposed to ABM spending in 1969. Under pressure from their liberal constituents, legislators began to address their vote on defense budgets differently. With respect to the question of defense spending versus the welfare budget, I inserted the unemployment rates in Congressional districts to gauge their representatives' response to the trade-off between guns and butter. What is noticeable is that Congressional members from districts with high unemployment rates were more likely to vote against ABM spending, all other things being equal. This finding is critical, because until the Vietnam War debacle, Democratic Presidents including FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ tried to convince the public that American can do both defense buildup and welfare spending. In the wake of the unpopular war in Southeast Asia, some Democrats in the national legislature came to discard the traditional view of both guns and butter being attainable and began to call for Great Society programs at the expense of defense-spending cuts.

Figure 2 shows the substantive significance of explanatory variables analyzed in the probit regression. The numbers reflect the percentage change in the predicted probability of voting against the ABM spending bills when a relevant independent variable moves from minimum to maximum values, while holding all other variables at baseline values (continuous variables are held at mean values and dichotomous variables are held at zero). The results confirm the significance of unemployment rates in explaining members' position-taking on the ABM issue. More specifically, when unemployment rates in districts change from 0.55 percent (minimum) to 6.07 percent (maximum), the probability of a member voting against ABM spending increases by 36 percent. Also interesting in constituency effects is the districts' military population and its impact on members' voting on ABM. The coefficients of military population variable in the models are positive, indicating that the greater the military population within a district, the more likely a member is to vote against ABM. Although the military population factor does not survive in a model with the ideology variable included, the negative effect of military population on member vote choice on the ABM bill is statistically significant in the second model. A temporary verdict is that the number of military personnel and employees in Congressional districts does not necessarily secure a hawkish position toward one of the most expensive weapons systems in US history.

Figure 2.

The substantive significance of the explanatory variables: Probability of voting anti-ABM by party members.

Finally, the results substantiate the evidence of cross-pressured members and their vote change. While a majority of Democrats were still supportive of defense spending in the 91st Congress, members from the Northeast or from the liberal Democratic Study Group voted significantly differently from their colleagues from the South. In all models tested, signs of Northeast coefficients are positive, which indicates that members from northeastern areas are more likely to oppose ABM than non-northeastern members in Congress. Thus the outcomes verify the importance of members' geographical representation in casting their votes over the ABM controversy. There is only an 8 percent increase in the probability for a vote against ABM in 1969, when a non-northeastern member (minimum value) is compared to a northeastern legislator (maximum value). In addition, an almost 30 percent probability jump is found for vote change into anti-ABM in 1969, when the legislator is a member of the Democratic Study Group.